I guess I have one more of these in me. After a couple days of just sitting at the beach, I was itching for some more adventure (must be my Bilbo Baggins blood). So I decided to set off in search of the gravesite of María Zambrano. Before saying why, you need the backstory.
I’m working on (well, haven’t been much lately) writing my next book, but Spain has had another idea percolating in me for the one after that. The hook is that I’d like to walk the whole Camino while reading Don Quixote. It would be an exploration of the nature of faith in today’s world, reflecting on the story of the crazy Don Quixote who seemed to leave the world better everywhere he went. Is that what faith is in a modern scientific world? Maybe.
There’s a strong Spanish vibe to this idea, and I’d also draw significantly on one of my favorite philosophers, the Spanish existentialist Miguel Unamuno. That got me wondering whether I should have the book be in conversation with him and Quixote. But counting me, that’s too many men. So maybe we also need the perspective of St. Teresa of Avila. But that leaves me with two people from the Middle Ages, and one who wrote at the beginning of the 20th century. It seems like we need a more contemporary voice.
So I asked ChatGPT, “Are there any contemporary Spanish women writing about faith, who would be in the tradition of Unamuno?” It said, “these are relatively few, but a few stand out.” The first one it mentioned was María Zambrano. It seems to me that I had heard her name before, but couldn’t have told you anything about her. It turns out that she was a philosopher who died in 1991, writing about faith, hope, and the human condition, often in dialogue with Unamuno’s existential and spiritual concerns. Sounds promising. Then I discovered, while traveling to Málaga that she was born in Málaga! That helps to give me better coverage of the country too, since Unamuno is from the north in Bilbao (not to be confused with Bilbo), and Teresa and Cervantes were more central. So I tried to learn more about her work.
ChatGPT told me that her most famous and influential work is El Hombre y lo Divino. I asked about an English translation, and it told me: Man and the Divine, translated by Maria Alter and Sophia B. Bonner, published in 1987 by University Press of America. Oh, nice. Maybe I can get in on Kindle and start reading it now. Hmmm… can’t seem to find it. Wait a second, the English translation appears nowhere on Amazon. I looked it up on worldcat.org that shows library holdings everywhere. Nope, not one library in the US has the book. It seems ChatGPT hallucinated that translation.
I keep reading some things about Zambrano while traveling. She lived in exile most of her career because of not supporting the Franco dictatorship after the Spanish Civil war. But then she was welcomed back to Spain, and she was the first woman to be given the Cervantes award for Spanish literature (another nifty tie-in for my project). And… after she died in 1991, she was buried in Málaga! Ok, I knew I’d need to go on another pilgrimage (a sequel to my pilgrimage to Simone Weil’s gravesite a couple of years ago). I asked ChatGPT where the cemetery is that she is buried in, and figured I would go today.
This morning I set off, learning the light-rail system of Málaga. It took me downtown, past the main train station in the city, which is named… Mária Zambrano Estación! Wow, this was destined to be. The train took me to with 2.5 km of the cemetery, and I could have taken a bus to get me within 200 meters, but I’m less confident learning city bus systems (buses are always turning, while trains stay on the tracks!). And I felt like it would be more of pilgrimage if I walked a chunk (and I haven’t done much walking for three days). So I walked through some cool sections of the city, arriving at my destination, the Cementario de San Miguel. It was not too large of a place thankfully, because I couldn’t find anyone in the offices to show me the way to the grave. I walked up and down the rows, and didn’t see anything standing out. I googled her grave site and found a photo, which I thought would help me because it was a distinctive structure. It also said it was between an orange tree and a lemon tree.
OK, that’s kind of helpful, but all I’m seeing are lime trees. I walked through the whole cemetery again and found nothing. I went back out to where the offices are, and this time found one open with a custodial lady sitting inside. I practiced my Spanish a couple times for, “I’m searching for the grave of Mária Zambrano.” When I finally delivered it to the lady, it elicited only a confused look. So I showed her the photo, and she shrugged her shoulders and said something I didn’t understand. I decided that she shouldn’t be held responsible for knowing where every person is buried in the cemetery, and walked out to sit in the shade and do some more googling — certainly someone has done this before and left some identifying clues.
While I was sitting there, the custodial lady came back out saying rather loudly (because of my difficulty understanding quiet Spanish?), “Ella no esta aqui!” She is not here! What? Have there been grave robbers?? No, it turns out ChatGPT led me astray again. Zambrano is buried in another cemetery in Málaga, about 20 miles away from her! OK, I kind of understand the hallucination problem when you ask it for something that doesn’t exist. But when something does exist and it gives you the wrong information, that is a bit frustration.
A couple of weeks ago I was on a panel for a video conference call about artificial intelligence with an actual expert in the field. We were talking about the difference between human personhood and AI’s increasingly good simulation of that. But I contended that I couldn’t really see holding AI morally responsible for what it does. Now I might be changing my tune! It seems like it was just telling me stuff I wanted to hear, and someone ought to punish it!
Alas, I started by walk back (the de-pilgrimage? Or maybe anti-pilgrimage, given the circumstances), and came upon a bookstore. That gave me another idea. It would be a kind of cool souvenir to at least get Zambrano’s book in the city of her birth. So I practiced my Spanish a little extra hard to ask where her books are (figuring I had to be somewhat more believable if I was buying a book in Spanish). I understood the clerk to say “the philosophy section” on some other floor (which I did not understand). But I made it look like I did, and walked up the flight of stairs. At the next landing there was a map of the bookstore and its sections, but unfortunately it had me standing right in sight of the clerk I had asked down below. She shouted up to me, just as I spotted the philosophy section on the map for the next floor up, and said back down to her, “una mas?” She said, “Si” but there was a kind of knowing in her eyes that said, “I can tell you’re a Spanish poser.”
On the next floor there was also a clerk, so I said my rehearsed phrase again, and she led me over to where the Zambrano books were. “Ah, excellente” I said. And then “Gracias” to indicate she wouldn’t be needed any more. But after five minutes of looking through the six or seven books by Zambrano, I couldn’t find the one I wanted, El Hombre y lo Divino. So I pulled out the google translator again to see how to say, “I don’t see this book there, is it perhaps in another section?” The clerk responded to my pretty convincing Spanish with “No” and started typing things into her computer terminal. In a minute she walked back over to the same section and found the book lying in the stack right in front of the bookshelf and handed it to me with a little disdain. I responded with the look in my eyes you give someone as if to say, “can you believe these people who pull books off the shelf and then don’t return them to their proper place?!”
The checkout process went smoothly, and I’m now in the possession of a book of existential philosophy in Spanish. The good news is that I hardly understand existential philosophy in English, so the comprehension won’t be that much of a drop off!
With this new success in my pocket, I decided to try to get the pilgrimage going again. This time I’d walk back to the María Zambrano train station. At least I’ll take a photo there with her statue or plaque or something. When I got there, it was huge — the kind of station that is also a mall. There was an information desk, so I went there to ask about Zambrano. I asked the lady (in Spanish) if she spoke English, and she said “a little.” My way of endearing myself to such people is to say (in English), “Oh good, I’m sure your English is better than my Spanish”. She blushed a little.
I said, “I’m looking for information about María Zambrano.”
She said, “That is why I’m here. Where are you going?”
“No,” I said, “I’m not looking for information about the station, but the person — the woman the station is named after.” That elicited a very confused look. I said, “Is there a statue of her, or a plaque?”
“No, not that I know of. I’d suggest you go to a bookstore.”
Yeah, I’ve already done that.
So ended my adventure. I spend the afternoon back sitting on the beach. Tomorrow is the pilgrimage to home, which is never quite the same as when you left it. But we’re excited to see it again for the first time.